Gender Discrimination by Gender: Voting in a Professional Society

Abstract

Although most economic theories of discrimination hypothesize that discrimination stems from people's discriminatory tastes, no empirical study of the labor market has examined tastes for discrimination directly or considered people's willingness to trade off other preferences to indulge their tastes for discrimination. The authors study this trade-off using a set of data on votes for officers in a professional association in 1989 and 1990. They find that female voters were much more likely to vote for female than for male candidates, and that other affinities between them and a candidate had little effect on their choices. Male voters, in contrast, were indifferent to the candidates' gender, and their choices were easily altered by other affinities to a candidate.